The QWorkspace widget provides a workspace window that can contain decorated windows, e.g. for MDI.

MDI (multiple document interface) applications typically have one main window with a menu bar and toolbar, and a central widget that is a QWorkspace. The workspace itself contains zero, one or more document windows, each of which is a widget.

The workspace itself is an ordinary Qt widget. It has a standard constructor that takes a parent widget and an object name. The parent window is usually a QMainWindow, but it need not be.

Document windows (i.e. MDI windows) are also ordinary Qt widgets which have the workspace as their parent widget. When you call show(), hide(), showMaximized(), setCaption(), etc. on a document window, it is shown, hidden, etc. with a frame, caption, icon and icon text, just as you'd expect. You can provide widget flags which will be used for the layout of the decoration or the behaviour of the widget itself.

To change or retrieve the geometry of MDI windows you must operate on the MDI widget's parentWidget(). (The parentWidget() provides access to the decorated window in which the MDI window's widget is shown.)

A document window becomes active when it gets the keyboard focus. You can also activate a window in code using setFocus(). The user can activate a window by moving focus in the usual ways, for example by clicking a window or by pressing Tab. The workspace emits a signal windowActivated() when it detects the activation change, and the function activeWindow() always returns a pointer to the active document window.

The convenience function windowList() returns a list of all document windows. This is useful to create a popup menu" <u>W</u>indows" on the fly, for example.

QWorkspace provides two built-in layout strategies for child windows: cascade() and tile(). Both are slots so you can easily connect menu entries to them.

If you want your users to be able to work with document windows larger than the actual workspace, set the scrollBarsEnabled property to TRUE.

If the top-level window contains a menu bar and a document window is maximised, QWorkspace moves the document window's minimize, restore and close buttons from the document window's frame to the workspace window's menu bar. It then inserts a window operations menu at the far left of the menu bar.

Returns a list of all windows. If order is CreationOrder (the default) the windows are listed in the order in which they had been inserted into the workspace. If order is StackingOrder the windows are listed in their stacking order, with the topmost window being the last window in the list.

If this property is set to TRUE, it is possible to resize child windows over the right or the bottom edge out of the visible area of the workspace. The workspace shows scrollbars to make it possible for the user to access those windows. If this property is set to FALSE (the default), resizing windows out of the visible area of the workspace is not permitted.

Set this property's value with setScrollBarsEnabled() and get this property's value with scrollBarsEnabled().

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If you find errors in this manual page, please report them to qt-bugs@trolltech.com. Please include the name of the manual page (qworkspace.3qt) and the Qt version (3.3.8).